Different in degree or kind: more Denton: (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 22, 2016, 13:33 (2979 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Unlike you, I do not claim to be able to read God's mind, but when I look at the products that exist now, and at the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth, any one of the above explanations seems to me to fit in perfectly with both teleological theism and evolutionary theory. 
DAVID: They fit perfectly because on the surface they both look exactly alike.
Dhw: Thank you. Yes, evolution will look the same whether your God planned it all or set it up to run its own free course through random mutations or an autonomous inventive mechanism.... Therefore, since Darwin did not discount the existence of God as the prime mover, teleological theism and Darwinian evolution are compatible.

DAVID: No! Darwin's mechanism is chance, theological evolution is mental planning, but they look the same! That Darwin accepted the possibility of God is beside the point. I'm looking at mechanism only.-Perhaps I should have been more precise. The question of compatibility depends on two interrelated subjective factors. Your basic assumption is that God's purpose was the creation of humans, and he preprogrammed or directly “guided” evolution in order to fulfil it. Here is an ALTERNATIVE reading of evolution and God's purpose: evolution is a higgledy-piggledy history of RANDOM comings and goings, and what we now see is a variety of living forms which may one day be replaced by different living forms. So that must be what God intended, which is why he deliberately created a mechanism that would provide a RANDOMLY changing array of life forms. And what God intended is what we mean by theistic teleology. -The scenarios that I gave you in my earlier post even allow for humans to have a special place through God's intervention (maybe he tweaked a few apes so that they could become humans), but they also allow for Darwin's random mutations as well as for my inventive mechanism. All of them illustrate the compatibility between Darwinian evolution and theistic teleology, based on a purpose derived from the history of evolution. What they do not allow for, however, is God's preplanning of every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder for the sake of producing humans, i.e. his control of the whole process. The alternative is that he did not WANT control of the whole process. Your personal, subjective version of how evolution works is based on your personal, subjective interpretation of God's purpose, and so the claim that Darwinian evolution is not compatible with theistic teleology depends on a purely subjective interpretation of God's purpose. Conversely it can also depend on a subjective atheistic interpretation of Darwin's theory, all too frequent on both sides of the fence, ignoring Darwin's own statements about it.